Same here!
A little bit of the fantastic and magical goes a long way. Especially since magic often goes awry and creates dangerous situations that require adventurers to resolve.
I am interested in the mechanics too.
I am becoming more interested in playing D&D with mini-games mixed in that borrow from other rules sets.
Maybe this game would make a Ravenloft game more interesting.
I don’t have my copy of Physics For Future Presidents handy, but I think it had a pretty convincing section on why manned space flight is resource intensive and unnecessary when space probes are sufficient to do all the work.
My opinion is that manned space flight is a luxury until the world...
1. No. It's not railroading.
You presented a unique/unusual situation to your players. At most that particular player seems to have had a failure of imagination about what's going on in the game world. Dropping some clues about what's going on might help. But I see no fault on your part here...
Usually level 1.
The last time we started at level 3 I wanted more meat on the characters’ bones so they could better survive the post war environment in Cormyr.